How To Restore An Old Website Automatically

If you’re trying to restore a site with less than 50 pages you can do it by hand most of the time using Google’s cache, bing or archive.org. However if its larger than 50 pages you might want to consider using the tool called Warrick website restoration. This project was started by two students at …. and they built this tool to automatically restore a damaged or lost site.

A couple of things. To get started you will need a machine running linux. I would recommend Ubuntu since its one of the best distributions and pretty easy to install and setup. The instructions are pretty easy to setup and install. If you have questions on how to do this I would recommend reading the instructions at warrick.cs.odu.edu.

To get started the best way is to pick from sample dates of the site you want to restore from archive.org. I did a post on how to restore and old website with archive.org.

After you find the date that best sample date you want to type out the following instruction from your linux machine.

Suppose you find the date of the sample you want is April 15, 2004 and you want the site stored in directorya/

sudo ./warrick.pl  -dr 2004-04-15 -D directorya -B http://www.example.com

This script will do its best to restore the site from all of the sources where it can find them. When its done your site will be restored.

If you don’t want to restore the site yourself, we can do it for you. Please read my next post to find out how.